Prior art drop packers of the type wherein the flow of articles must be interrupted so that the packer can drop the contents of a grid structure downwardly into an upwardly open packing case are shown in prior art U.S. Pat. No. 3,353,331 issued to Rowekamp in 1967, and U.S. Pat. No. 3,561,189 issued to Raudat in 1971.
The prior art also shows the general concept of handling articles in groups so that they are picked up at one point in the orbit of a carrier and subsequently moved to a discharge station which is associated with a packing case. The following patents are cited as being relevant to this general packaging approach. Sevel U.S. Pat. No. 2,921,425, Pearson U.S. Pat. No. 3,589,094, Pearson U.S. Pat. No. 3,744,213, and Ullman U.S. Pat. No. 3,832,826. These patents suggest that the articles to be picked up at an infeed station must be gripped somehow in order to be moved around a portion of the orbit path for the pickup mechanism so as to be suitably controlled for deposit in a packing case fed tangentially to the orbit path.
In the present invention the articles at the infeed station are continuously moving and unique grid structures are provided which move through the infeed station at a horizontal component of speed matched to that of the infeed speed for the articles themselves with the result that the articles are picked up without necessity for any gripping action. The grid structures are so designed that the articles can be subsequently drop packed into a packing case, again without interruption of the motion of either the grid structure or the packing case to be loaded.